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Comment by 000ooo000 | Hacker News Reader

>Simply mashing a few letters together can be empowering for ourselves while being exclusionary for others. It’s an artifact—albeit a small one—of our egos. We know what the technobabble means. Our justified place in the universe is maintained.

Your Oh So Humble Ego has you thinking there's some ulterior motive to me typing 3 letters instead of 20.

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Dialect formation is also an instinct when forming close connections with any group of people. The prevalence of acronyms in workplaces is probably due in larger part to collective rather than individual ego formation.

This doesn’t read as all or nothing to me. If you’re communicating with somebody who doesn’t understand the acronyms (or even someone who might not understand the acronyms), and you still do it, then yeah, it’s a signal that there may be something underneath the surface there.

Obviously if we’re all familiar then go right ahead and save us all some time, but it’s worth considering how something as benign as using acronyms might subtly exclude people from the conversation for no good reason. The value of the article is in recognising this.

I'm fine excluding people who can't ask a very simple question when they encounter an acronym they don't recognise. I'm also fine excluding people who think they're owed something because they're ignorant.

I did get the feeling that all of these "problematic" behaviors were simply about saving everyone's time.

Yeah I kinda stopped reading there. The author’s pov seem quite skewed by a few experiences and making the wrong correlations

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